To preface this post, many if not most things that happen around us, happen in the realm of politics. I have heard from several people recently of their weariness regarding politics and I completely understand that. The petty, corrupt nature of what goes on in the world of politics wears on peoples souls and causes many to just conclude, it’s not worth it, and walk away from involvement at any level or reduced levels at a best. The problem with that is, that is exactly the intent of the petty and the corrupt.
When good people decide they have had enough and they turn away in disgust, the people perpetrating the wrongs on society through their bad actions are left that much more free to do so. Hence, it is important to acknowledge one’s weariness, then put that weariness aside and engage the bad actors. It is critical in that engagement to send a loud message that we as citizens have had enough!
With that premise set, New Jersey just joined Arizona and Texas to ban non-dealership car sales in their states. The laws in all three states were written by the car dealership associations and given to state legislators in these states to dutifully sign. Arizona was first, Texas next and now New Jersey with other states considering these restrictive laws in their states. While these laws may not have been specifically aimed at an American car company, Tesla Motors, (in most recent cases, they are), the net effect impacts Tesla’s ability to compete fairly in these markets.
Tesla manufactures their award winning, highly recognized, technologically advanced Model S sedans in Fremont, California. They employ American workers and are committed to continuing to do so with a new 5 billion dollar battery factory in one of four western states currently under consideration.
Keep in mind, this will not stop sales of Tesla’s in these states. It will only make it more difficult for Tesla to compete in what is supposed to be an open, free market environment. The car dealership associations have no interest in an open free market and have demonstrated their ability to influence corrupt politicians in stacking the deck against Tesla and anyone else who would dare to sell their personal transportation products on-line.
Following this logic, one could imagine computer and electronics manufacturers who sell on line having laws written against them, effectively banning sales through anyone other than a local store. The same could just as easily apply for books and music. I would think Apple, Amazon, Yahoo and others might have something to say about that. Perhaps Tesla should approach Apple to consider a partnership. I’d love to see the car dealership groups take on Apple.
My question is, how can these blatantly non competitive, seemingly illegal practices be allowed in 2014?
This is the uncomfortable politics part. Republicans and Libertarians, stay with me while I review a bit of history. I would submit this all started when President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980's announced he was no longer going to enforce the Sherman Anti-trust Act. The result of ignoring this legislation resulted in the wholesale destruction of the family farm by the rapid development of what has become a massive infrastructure of modern Agri-business monopolies.
The destruction of Sherman, introduced in 1890 to combat Standard Oil and the Robber Barons of the 19th century also resulted in the devastation of small business all across America over the last three decades. Just look at any small town main street to see what I’m talking about. Your can get your building supplies, as long as you want to shop at Lowes or Home Depot. The same is true with groceries. Most stores are owned by giant distribution businesses that come under the umbrella of one or two companies. Look at what Wal-Mart has done to local businesses in every community they have entered. The same applies regarding where you buy your gas, there are basically five oil companies on earth controlling all oil and gas distribution. The examples go on and on. If you don’t agree with this summation, that is fine, it’s just my opinion demonstrating how this trend toward monopolies controlling willing politicians is comfortably dangerous to free markets. That’s my only point here.
Regulations implemented in years past as a result of terrible abuses by super wealthy “businessmen” had a purpose. Part of the purpose of these controls was to de-couple the influence monopolist felt, and clearly still feel, they have a right to exercise in concert with elected officials to accomplish their unfair business practices. Instead of operating legitimately in the free market system, they simply get legislators to write laws making it difficult or impossible for their competition to operate. By demonizing regulations, those who want to act on behalf of those powerful forces who have influence over them feel free to remove the regulations. The net affect is, the monopolists come right back to more than willing legislators to do their bidding, at the expense of the consumer.
My hope is to coordinate with people of all political stripes to combat this illegal behavior and reinstitute rules of business that are both constitutional and fair to all who would legitimately participate in a truly free market.
This is a formal call to my Republican, Libertarian and Democratic affiliated friends to join me is raising our voices in opposition to these clearly corrupt actions, committed by dealership associations across the county, who have lined up against free markets as they should exist. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Big Oil's Feet of Clay
I had a vision last night after learning of yet another burst tar sands pipeline, this time in Texas. That’s five major pipeline failures this week alone.
I was also reminded of the obscene profits and seemingly unchecked power multinational oil companies currently enjoy; Exxon/Mobil, 122 million dollars a day in profit. Imagine the corruption that is available when companies exceed the GDP of a majority of countries on earth.
Before going to bed I saw another photo of what the Canadian’s are doing to their pristine forest in Alberta just to mine tar sands. I have seen these visuals before and you can too. Just Google, Alberta Tar Sands. Let me prepare you, if it doesn’t make you physically sick, it will most likely give you nightmares. That’s what happened to me last night.
My vision goes something like this. There is a giant standing in the middle of a vast wasteland that was once pristine forest.
As I approached the giant, I noticed the feet and lower legs of the beast were a different, grayish color. Getting closer, I saw in this grey area what looked like millions of tiny moving creatures. When I was finally close enough to view what these creatures were, I was aghast when I recognized them as us! A billion little humans holding up this giant as it wreaked destruction to land, air and sea.
At the mid-point of this grey mass I saw people dying and falling off with new young people near the bottom being integrated into believing their new role as part of the massive grey foundation was critical to everyone's existence. Their participation was critical because of the "freedom" oil provided to everyone and all the wonderful jobs that were bestowed by this "benevolent giant".
These new additions to the massive grey feet drove huge SUV's and giant pickup trucks. They seemed to ignore the tiny voices crying out from the ground around the feet of the giant about the destruction they were a part of. They drove huge vehicles like Hummers, many times a single occupant per vehicle because somehow they were convinced that, to be able to do so was an exercise of their “freedoms”, instead of what it was, slavery to the oil giant and pollution to the earth and sky.
These new people were so blinded they refused to even acknowledge the poisonous air they were breathing, the dirty water all around them, and the diseases they were dying from.
So the destruction continued to all things living at the hands of the giant.
Then I saw something amazing. People who were once part of this giant were leaving the grey mass because they had suddenly become aware that, what they were a part of was evil. They came to understand there was a way to be free from their enslavement to the giant.
Parts of the feet of clay were starting to disappear.
The giant knew what was going on but was so convinced of its mass global, near universal influence that it just kept stomping on.
My vision flashed forward to a time that must have been a hundred years later with a view of a massive mountain range. I was flying above it, my body suspended just below the outer atmosphere of a stunning green planet. The shape of the mountain range seemed strange in its size and shape. As I flew along, it struck me how the mountain range did not have a natural shape like the normal spine like configuration of all the mountain ranges around it.
Suddenly, when I was far enough away, the shape became clear. The mountain range I was looking at with such curiosity was the beast! It had fallen face down with no legs below the knees with no grey mass where the legs and feet had once been. The shape was covered with trees and snow, with beautiful large lakes in its hollow's and rolling mist in its meadows.
The beast had fallen when its feet and lower legs disappeared and the earth had reclaimed it. The people lived in it, and around it, with clean air and water in its upper regions and vast low lying adjacent lands.
My vision was changing. I wanted to know more. Almost as if I could move by my will, I began to descend. After feeling my feet touch the earth, I approached the people and asked them what happened. They told me the story of how their ancestors had suddenly become aware of what they had been a part of and how they decided they would abandon their roles as pieces of the monster.
Along with committing to cease their involvement as the foundation and feet of this destructive force they discovered two distressing but ultimately enlightening things.
First, not only were they the feet and legs as they first thought but they also made up the entirety of the beast. Millions who did not just buy and use the products produced but also worked for and depended on the giant for their livings and sustenance. In the upper levels were complicit governments who worked at the direction of the beast and its vast wealth and power. Even at the top, the head, were the leaders who managed and directed feeding this all consuming force.
The monster was us, through and through, bottom to top.
Second, the monster could be toppled, one soul at a time. But the souls who mattered most were the masses in the feet. These were the hardest to convince as they just wanted to live their lives in as “normal” a fashion as possible. Life, after all was hard and oil, so it seemed, made everything so much more convenient as long as they could ignore all the devastation it wreaked on them and everyone around them.
We were all warned back in the late 1990’s they told me. We were warned about peak oil. We were told when the oil companies started claiming tar sands and oil shale was the answer to the claims of peak oil, that they had come very near to the end of cheap easily recoverable oil.
The monster had to dispel the reality of peak oil, or die. The people at the head of the beast knew that the reality of non-renewable resource recovery was upon them and they had to convince us all it was not really true.
They hid the destruction as long as they could before the word got out about what they were doing. The traditional reserves had hit their breaking point and the destruction of the earth to recover these unimaginable dirty forms of oil had now been transformed to the new normal. They didn’t even bother to contend that tar sands were far dirtier to process, took far more water and energy to produce and left exponentially more waste than any other form of oil recovery in history. They thought they could dangle the temptation of money and economic security to the world and continue to tell the world that we just could never do without oil, no matter how dirty it was to make, or how risky it was to transport.
It worked at first. Having been hit by the Great Recession, states and countries who had these substances within their borders, were eager to attract and encourage these companies to come to their districts and dig up their lands in the interest of economic security.
But the truth could not be hidden forever. Pipelines burst on a regular basis, unable to handle the extreme pressures needed to push the highly corrosive, asphalt like tar sands through without rupturing time and time again. Picture after picture of vast areas of unspoiled land poisoned by the toxic sludge kept flooding into the public consciousness and literally flooding into many people’s streams, rivers, lakes, streets and even their yards.
First a few, then hundreds, then thousands began to see there were technologies that did not require oil for transportation at all. Electric vehicles, many literally charged with solar panels, began to surface all around us. By early 2013, 75,000 plug-in vehicles had been sold in just two years since their re-introduction. It had taken Toyota nearly 5 years to reach the 50,000 unit level with hybrids when they had been introduced a decade earlier. Now nearly all the major car companies were producing or working on electric vehicle technologies.
The auto industry had changed. Before the great recession they were complicit with the oil companies in every way. But then came the crash. When the auto companies needed help from the beast the beast ignored them and left them to die. The tie that kept the beast alive was broken in the minds of the new car industry and it would never be the same again.
The more people talked to those who converted to electric over gas the more they were amazed to hear how many were not going to the gas station at all anymore. It started to hit people. Why am I going to the gas station once or twice a week spending thousands and thousands of dollars every year on gas, oil and maintenance when my electric vehicle counterparts are not shouldering those cost at all anymore? Plus, electric vehicle drivers don’t pollute at all. They couldn’t if they wanted to, they didn’t even have tailpipes! They actually owned cars that had a return on investment, a first in the auto industry.
The imaginations of the gas drivers started to look at the smog filled sky’s over their cities, with a hope that this possibly wasn’t a permanent condition after all. Their imaginations started to challenge them as the evidence began to present itself right in front of them every time they were passed on the freeway by a car that did not use gas. They started to question whether we just needed to live with poisons in the air from a billion cars and trucks producing emissions from burning gas. They started to wonder if so many needed to die in the cases of those who suffered from lung and heart diseases brought on and exacerbated by the poisonous air.
The final blows came as millions and millions turned to the disruptive clean technologies that would ultimately bring down the beast. Natural gas in large trucks, then eventually hydrogen, taking commercial transport completely off gas and oil for good. Solar powered High Speed Rail cutting short hop air travel to near zero levels. Air travel became what it was intended to be, long range flights of 1,500 to 12,000 miles and even that would be done with hydrogen powered aircraft. Hypersonic flight was now possible due to new fuels and technologies that did not pollute while super fast, clean aircraft cruised through the upper atmosphere.
But the beginning of a new era was birthed through the feet. The average person coming to understand that polluting transportation technologies were not only against their best environmental interest but also not in their best economic interest.
They saw that they had been fooled into thinking they were chained to the ever increasing cost of fuel, creating a constant stress on their personal finances. The sacrifice was so great and yet the super wealthy corporations who always demanded more from them had a never-ending lust for more of their hard earned dollars.
Worst of all, they came to realize this giant monster was directing the most powerful military on earth, through oil men in powerful political positions, to send their daughters and sons off to be maimed for life, or killed in wars waged on behalf of the oil monster. Massive escalating wars that served one purpose and one purpose alone, to keep the flow of the lifeblood of an industrialized society flowing unabated, oil.
It wasn’t until the wars paused long enough for people of every political stripe to realize that, had the countries their children were fighting in not had oil, the monster would not have cared on whit about, “threats to the region”.
The trillions of dollars spent on behalf of the monster, the lives changed and lost forever was all to feed the monsters veracious appetite. The monster could never tolerate talk of “the end of oil”. That was the monsters lifeblood that kept the cash flowing that it had to have in ever increasing quantities.
After the last Great War in the desert sands in the early 2000’s the monster had turned it’s attention to tearing up the earth in places where it knew it would only have to wage war on the earth itself, without use of a military. The monster had become somewhat self-aware that the injured and wounded knew why they had been in the desert and it had nothing to do with “protecting anyone’s freedoms”.
Veterans began to drive cars that used very little gas or no gas at all. They told their children to never again fight for any corporation and to always adamantly demand their government never commit its people to war on behalf of a business.
The children’s eyes were opened when they saw the destruction in their families and in the families of those far away in the desert. They saw that the people who were installed in place of a dictator had turned out just as bad or worse than the man their parents were sent to oust.
They saw the determination on their parent’s faces to be free from the blood and structure of the monster…… and the feet accelerated in their disintegration.
Before all the High Speed Rail, the hydrogen planes, the natural gas trucks, it was the millions and millions of people, who like tiny specs of sand, fell from the feet of the monster. It was the individuals who put solar on their homes, demanded and purchased electric cars and trucks by the millions, that brought the monster down.
The monster tried to fight back by cutting the price of oil to all time lows, but the people had seen this trick before and knew the inevitable rise would come once the monster became assured as many people were convinced of it’s inevitability as it took to keep it standing and stomping through the earth.
My vision was coming to a close now. As I reflected I came to understand the strength and determination of the people to never let this happen again.
They committed together that any future technology that came along would be closely scrutinized and evaluated. Careful analysis would be conducted to make sure that new technologies would never be adopted if they were determined to be destructive to the earth or to its occupants, no matter how great the creature comforts they would claim to afford.
Innovation and creativity was encouraged and supported, as long as new endeavors met the simple parameters of not being destructive to life and the lessons of the past were never forgotten.
I was also reminded of the obscene profits and seemingly unchecked power multinational oil companies currently enjoy; Exxon/Mobil, 122 million dollars a day in profit. Imagine the corruption that is available when companies exceed the GDP of a majority of countries on earth.
Before going to bed I saw another photo of what the Canadian’s are doing to their pristine forest in Alberta just to mine tar sands. I have seen these visuals before and you can too. Just Google, Alberta Tar Sands. Let me prepare you, if it doesn’t make you physically sick, it will most likely give you nightmares. That’s what happened to me last night.
My vision goes something like this. There is a giant standing in the middle of a vast wasteland that was once pristine forest.
As I approached the giant, I noticed the feet and lower legs of the beast were a different, grayish color. Getting closer, I saw in this grey area what looked like millions of tiny moving creatures. When I was finally close enough to view what these creatures were, I was aghast when I recognized them as us! A billion little humans holding up this giant as it wreaked destruction to land, air and sea.
At the mid-point of this grey mass I saw people dying and falling off with new young people near the bottom being integrated into believing their new role as part of the massive grey foundation was critical to everyone's existence. Their participation was critical because of the "freedom" oil provided to everyone and all the wonderful jobs that were bestowed by this "benevolent giant".
These new additions to the massive grey feet drove huge SUV's and giant pickup trucks. They seemed to ignore the tiny voices crying out from the ground around the feet of the giant about the destruction they were a part of. They drove huge vehicles like Hummers, many times a single occupant per vehicle because somehow they were convinced that, to be able to do so was an exercise of their “freedoms”, instead of what it was, slavery to the oil giant and pollution to the earth and sky.
These new people were so blinded they refused to even acknowledge the poisonous air they were breathing, the dirty water all around them, and the diseases they were dying from.
So the destruction continued to all things living at the hands of the giant.
Then I saw something amazing. People who were once part of this giant were leaving the grey mass because they had suddenly become aware that, what they were a part of was evil. They came to understand there was a way to be free from their enslavement to the giant.
Parts of the feet of clay were starting to disappear.
The giant knew what was going on but was so convinced of its mass global, near universal influence that it just kept stomping on.
My vision flashed forward to a time that must have been a hundred years later with a view of a massive mountain range. I was flying above it, my body suspended just below the outer atmosphere of a stunning green planet. The shape of the mountain range seemed strange in its size and shape. As I flew along, it struck me how the mountain range did not have a natural shape like the normal spine like configuration of all the mountain ranges around it.
Suddenly, when I was far enough away, the shape became clear. The mountain range I was looking at with such curiosity was the beast! It had fallen face down with no legs below the knees with no grey mass where the legs and feet had once been. The shape was covered with trees and snow, with beautiful large lakes in its hollow's and rolling mist in its meadows.
The beast had fallen when its feet and lower legs disappeared and the earth had reclaimed it. The people lived in it, and around it, with clean air and water in its upper regions and vast low lying adjacent lands.
My vision was changing. I wanted to know more. Almost as if I could move by my will, I began to descend. After feeling my feet touch the earth, I approached the people and asked them what happened. They told me the story of how their ancestors had suddenly become aware of what they had been a part of and how they decided they would abandon their roles as pieces of the monster.
Along with committing to cease their involvement as the foundation and feet of this destructive force they discovered two distressing but ultimately enlightening things.
First, not only were they the feet and legs as they first thought but they also made up the entirety of the beast. Millions who did not just buy and use the products produced but also worked for and depended on the giant for their livings and sustenance. In the upper levels were complicit governments who worked at the direction of the beast and its vast wealth and power. Even at the top, the head, were the leaders who managed and directed feeding this all consuming force.
The monster was us, through and through, bottom to top.
Second, the monster could be toppled, one soul at a time. But the souls who mattered most were the masses in the feet. These were the hardest to convince as they just wanted to live their lives in as “normal” a fashion as possible. Life, after all was hard and oil, so it seemed, made everything so much more convenient as long as they could ignore all the devastation it wreaked on them and everyone around them.
We were all warned back in the late 1990’s they told me. We were warned about peak oil. We were told when the oil companies started claiming tar sands and oil shale was the answer to the claims of peak oil, that they had come very near to the end of cheap easily recoverable oil.
The monster had to dispel the reality of peak oil, or die. The people at the head of the beast knew that the reality of non-renewable resource recovery was upon them and they had to convince us all it was not really true.
They hid the destruction as long as they could before the word got out about what they were doing. The traditional reserves had hit their breaking point and the destruction of the earth to recover these unimaginable dirty forms of oil had now been transformed to the new normal. They didn’t even bother to contend that tar sands were far dirtier to process, took far more water and energy to produce and left exponentially more waste than any other form of oil recovery in history. They thought they could dangle the temptation of money and economic security to the world and continue to tell the world that we just could never do without oil, no matter how dirty it was to make, or how risky it was to transport.
It worked at first. Having been hit by the Great Recession, states and countries who had these substances within their borders, were eager to attract and encourage these companies to come to their districts and dig up their lands in the interest of economic security.
But the truth could not be hidden forever. Pipelines burst on a regular basis, unable to handle the extreme pressures needed to push the highly corrosive, asphalt like tar sands through without rupturing time and time again. Picture after picture of vast areas of unspoiled land poisoned by the toxic sludge kept flooding into the public consciousness and literally flooding into many people’s streams, rivers, lakes, streets and even their yards.
First a few, then hundreds, then thousands began to see there were technologies that did not require oil for transportation at all. Electric vehicles, many literally charged with solar panels, began to surface all around us. By early 2013, 75,000 plug-in vehicles had been sold in just two years since their re-introduction. It had taken Toyota nearly 5 years to reach the 50,000 unit level with hybrids when they had been introduced a decade earlier. Now nearly all the major car companies were producing or working on electric vehicle technologies.
The auto industry had changed. Before the great recession they were complicit with the oil companies in every way. But then came the crash. When the auto companies needed help from the beast the beast ignored them and left them to die. The tie that kept the beast alive was broken in the minds of the new car industry and it would never be the same again.
The more people talked to those who converted to electric over gas the more they were amazed to hear how many were not going to the gas station at all anymore. It started to hit people. Why am I going to the gas station once or twice a week spending thousands and thousands of dollars every year on gas, oil and maintenance when my electric vehicle counterparts are not shouldering those cost at all anymore? Plus, electric vehicle drivers don’t pollute at all. They couldn’t if they wanted to, they didn’t even have tailpipes! They actually owned cars that had a return on investment, a first in the auto industry.
The imaginations of the gas drivers started to look at the smog filled sky’s over their cities, with a hope that this possibly wasn’t a permanent condition after all. Their imaginations started to challenge them as the evidence began to present itself right in front of them every time they were passed on the freeway by a car that did not use gas. They started to question whether we just needed to live with poisons in the air from a billion cars and trucks producing emissions from burning gas. They started to wonder if so many needed to die in the cases of those who suffered from lung and heart diseases brought on and exacerbated by the poisonous air.
The final blows came as millions and millions turned to the disruptive clean technologies that would ultimately bring down the beast. Natural gas in large trucks, then eventually hydrogen, taking commercial transport completely off gas and oil for good. Solar powered High Speed Rail cutting short hop air travel to near zero levels. Air travel became what it was intended to be, long range flights of 1,500 to 12,000 miles and even that would be done with hydrogen powered aircraft. Hypersonic flight was now possible due to new fuels and technologies that did not pollute while super fast, clean aircraft cruised through the upper atmosphere.
But the beginning of a new era was birthed through the feet. The average person coming to understand that polluting transportation technologies were not only against their best environmental interest but also not in their best economic interest.
They saw that they had been fooled into thinking they were chained to the ever increasing cost of fuel, creating a constant stress on their personal finances. The sacrifice was so great and yet the super wealthy corporations who always demanded more from them had a never-ending lust for more of their hard earned dollars.
Worst of all, they came to realize this giant monster was directing the most powerful military on earth, through oil men in powerful political positions, to send their daughters and sons off to be maimed for life, or killed in wars waged on behalf of the oil monster. Massive escalating wars that served one purpose and one purpose alone, to keep the flow of the lifeblood of an industrialized society flowing unabated, oil.
It wasn’t until the wars paused long enough for people of every political stripe to realize that, had the countries their children were fighting in not had oil, the monster would not have cared on whit about, “threats to the region”.
The trillions of dollars spent on behalf of the monster, the lives changed and lost forever was all to feed the monsters veracious appetite. The monster could never tolerate talk of “the end of oil”. That was the monsters lifeblood that kept the cash flowing that it had to have in ever increasing quantities.
After the last Great War in the desert sands in the early 2000’s the monster had turned it’s attention to tearing up the earth in places where it knew it would only have to wage war on the earth itself, without use of a military. The monster had become somewhat self-aware that the injured and wounded knew why they had been in the desert and it had nothing to do with “protecting anyone’s freedoms”.
Veterans began to drive cars that used very little gas or no gas at all. They told their children to never again fight for any corporation and to always adamantly demand their government never commit its people to war on behalf of a business.
The children’s eyes were opened when they saw the destruction in their families and in the families of those far away in the desert. They saw that the people who were installed in place of a dictator had turned out just as bad or worse than the man their parents were sent to oust.
They saw the determination on their parent’s faces to be free from the blood and structure of the monster…… and the feet accelerated in their disintegration.
Before all the High Speed Rail, the hydrogen planes, the natural gas trucks, it was the millions and millions of people, who like tiny specs of sand, fell from the feet of the monster. It was the individuals who put solar on their homes, demanded and purchased electric cars and trucks by the millions, that brought the monster down.
The monster tried to fight back by cutting the price of oil to all time lows, but the people had seen this trick before and knew the inevitable rise would come once the monster became assured as many people were convinced of it’s inevitability as it took to keep it standing and stomping through the earth.
My vision was coming to a close now. As I reflected I came to understand the strength and determination of the people to never let this happen again.
They committed together that any future technology that came along would be closely scrutinized and evaluated. Careful analysis would be conducted to make sure that new technologies would never be adopted if they were determined to be destructive to the earth or to its occupants, no matter how great the creature comforts they would claim to afford.
Innovation and creativity was encouraged and supported, as long as new endeavors met the simple parameters of not being destructive to life and the lessons of the past were never forgotten.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Hammering our Swords into Plowshares
Following is my proposal to Federal and State Governments to help mitigate post war job loss and avoid the inevitable economic impact of such losses as experienced in past years as a result of defense cuts.
Phase I
My proposal is we begin to transform our defense industry to design, develop and build modern infrastructure now and for future generations.
The rational is simple. Not only do we have the opportunity to literally transform and modernize America's infrastructure, we also have the chance for the first time in the last 100 years to avoid a drastic post war defense industry and aerospace reduction. These reductions always hit our economy hard as we have thousands upon thousands of Americans depending on military contractors for their living.
We have lived through many of these, bust and boom cycles. Each cycle seems to get more severe after each war and also drive us to a permanent state of war in the interest of making sure all our new surveillance, military hardware and killing machines work in real world applications. As we know, this is just the madness President Eisenhower warned us of regarding the self perpetuating and ever growing "military industrial complex".
We start with the obvious. Move military contractors to the design, development and production of the fastest most efficient high speed rail systems on earth. With all the existing technological and intellectual infrastructure already in place within our defense contractor base, there is no reason we ever have to buy high speed rail systems from France, Germany, Canada or China.
Would it not be far more advantages in helping to mitigate loss of defense jobs to instead fast track Boeing, Lockheed/Martin, Raytheon, Honeywell along with their extensive supply bases to develop and build HSR instead of Siemens, Bombardier, TGV, or CRH? We can do it all right here and right now and protect American workers at the same time.
Parallel Phase II
Electrification of all existing rail, including commercial, freight and non HSR passenger lines can be done in parallel with HSR development. The annual cost savings on diesel fuel alone would be in the billions of dollars and the savings in diesel emissions (some of the worst due to their heavy particulate) would be in the millions of tons annually.
As a National priority this program could be called the Weapons to Transportation Modernization Act of 2013.
It could take a long time to build a HSR network in the United States that would criss-cross our Nation, it all depends on our national will to do so. In the end, whether it took years or decades the positive effects would last for many generations. How satisfying it would be to picture our grandchildren riding clean, fast rail around our country with their kids and thinking back to those days in the early 2010's when their grandparents had the vision to facilitate travel on this amazing network. I can see in my mind, Seth and Avalyn with their kids, looking out the window of a train blazing across the great plains to where ever they are going while telling them stories about our Nations history and how visionary's of the past made wonderful things happen like the train they were riding on.
Blazing into history...
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
It's all About Intentions, Credibility and the Truth!
The media matters article, "Fox and Friends Deceptively Edits Obama's Comments on Small Business" by Remington Shepard shares the details of Fox's "selective editing".
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/16/fox-amp-friends-deceptively-edits-obamas-commen/187146
For anyone to give Fox News a single shred of credibility after their years of hack "reporting" continues to amaze me. The hatchet job Fox did Monday as detailed by Remington, resulted in an outright misrepresentation of the truth on President Obama's remarks on why small business, or anyone else for that matter, does not achieve success solely by themselves. This whole incident only confirms for me again that Fox watchers must be intentionally blinding themselves to the truth due to their extreme hatred for liberals and the President. This hatred is whipped up by years and years of rumors and outright falsehoods, presented by Fox to both shelter the bad behavior of the right, and constantly bash efforts of the left to make our country whole again after the disastrous Bush, Cheney, Rove debacle.
By the way, if you're going to hate a liberal, by proxy you hate me. Just for the record, if you are on the right, I do not hate you in any way. I'm completely confused by your apparent hateful, humorless, bitter, aggressive behavior but I do not hate you. To most accurately describe how I feel toward you would be to say, I miss you. I long for the days we can sit together and talk and debate and ultimately work together to solve our nation’s issues, but I do not hate you. I truly do wish we could talk. We should make it a priority to stop emulating the non-productive behavior of those in Washington who refuse to talk or work together unless or until they get their way regarding whatever policy is being discussed or regain the majority they aspire to. In my opinion their behavior is exactly why George Washington strongly warned against political parties in his farewell letter to a young nation of states. His main concerns were that people would become more allegiant to their political parties than they would be to their country. Look at us, it seems we have not heeded Washington’s advice and that is very sad. It’s time we take matters into our own hands and start talking more and shouting less.
The hatred many of us have observed has been fostered by years of people submitting themselves to the propaganda from Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Gaffney, Fox and many others for decades. Remember Frank Gaffney? He's the one who accused the Obama administration of redesigning the missile defense program logo to claim that this new logo was smoking gun evidence of Barack Obama's submission to Sharia law. When he found out the logo was from the Bush administration, he quietly retracted his claim. Any guess how many right wing bloggers are still running with that bit of complete nonsense? Remember Michael Savage? He's the one who wrote a book titled, "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder", a title so off the scale offensive to both those who suffer from mental illness and to liberals, that it's only real enlightenment is to the right wings total disregard for civility and honest and open discourse. From the rights perspective, in America today, unless you agree with them you can't possibly be sane or American. Even your legitimacy as a person, who knows anything, or about what it takes to "understand America", as John Sununu stated earlier this week, plays into the dog whistle politics challenging the Presidents legitimacy and citizenship. This is the same John Sununu who was born in Havana, Cuba, the son of Victoria and John Saleh Sununu. He is of Palestinian and Greek descent. His father grew up in Jerusalem and his mother was born in San Salvador. No one, including me is challenging Sununu's right to an opinion or is questioning his citizenship. He is a citizen of the U.S. in spite of actually being born in a foreign country. John, on the other hand feels quite comfortable highlighting President Obama's "otherness" and excoriating the President for being born in Hawaii, (last I checked that was a State within the United States) and living abroad as a child. This is yet another amazing example of complete and total hypocrisy from someone who is a leader of the right and carries considerable baggage from his past position of political power himself.
As White House Chief of Staff, Sununu reportedly took personal trips, for skiing and other purposes, and classified them as official, for purposes such as conservation or promoting the Thousand Points of Light. The Washington Post wrote that Sununu's jets "took him to fat-cat Republican fund-raisers, ski lodges, golf resorts and even his dentist in Boston. Sununu had paid the government only $892 for his more than $615,000 worth of military jet travels. Sununu said that his use of the jets was necessary because he had to be near a telephone at all times for reasons of national security. Sununu worsened the situation shortly afterwards when, after leaking rumors of financial difficulties in his family, he traveled to a rare stamp auction at Christie's auction house in New York City from Washington in a government limousine, spending $5,000 on rare stamps. Sununu then sent the car and driver back to Washington unoccupied while he returned on a corporate jet. In the course of one week, 45 newspapers ran editorials on Sununu, nearly all of them critical of his actions.
Sununu repaid over $47,000 to the government for the flights on the orders of White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, with the help of the Republican Party. However, the reimbursements were at commercial rates, which are about one-tenth the cost of the actual flights; one ski trip to Vail, Colorado alone had cost taxpayers $86,330.
Now this very same man is held up as a representative of Governor Romney. We are expected to listen to him as if he were the paradigm of truth and justice. All I see is a bitter, hateful, hypocritical, divisive person who presents nothing positive in the political discourse.
I will say again as I have said many times before, my father very specifically warned me to keep a wary eye on someone once I discovered that person or institution had been exposed in a lie. This was especially this case when the discovered lie was intentional. Dad would say and I paraphrase, their tendency to continue to be a false source of information is high, and you should never trust anything else they say unless when presented with the truth they correct themselves. This is in keeping with who my father was, a man of grace.
For those of you who may feel compelled to come back at me with "everyone lies", keep it to yourself. I already know that oft used defense mechanism. It only serves to muddy the waters and cover the bad deeds being presented. Inaccuracies are out there, we all know that. I try to follow sources that when they state something that turns out to be wrong, they as quickly as possible take the time to, in detail, correct themselves. In the case of folks who get "over the top passionate" and say offensive things, I watch to see if they humbly and assuredly apologize for their misconduct and or misstatements. I believe I am following my father’s advice when I do this. It has served me well in determining who is really trying to make sure they present the facts as honestly as they can.
To reiterate, I am talking about intentional bold faced misrepresentations of what a person said, i.e., a group of Fox editors sitting in a room with the entire context of what the President said, and intentionally taking 30 or so words out of hundreds to willfully misrepresent what he said and then repeating it on national T.V.
My God, is it asking too much to acknowledge your source of information is corrupt?
Much to my embarrassment I admit that I was a Fox watcher for years, until 2004 right after the re-election of President Bush. The day after the election I turned Fox News on and much to my dismay there was just as much shouting and discontent as ever. I felt sick inside. They got their guy in office didn't they? What were they so unhappy about? Was there never a time that they would just lighten up and at least try to look like they were happy about something, anything?
The image of that day stuck with me for a long time. I stopped turning on Fox when I got home and immediately noticed a marked difference in my disposition. I wasn't up tight and full and angst all the time. My life was more peaceful. With the help of my lovely wife I started doing the research and found what I had already suspected for years, Fox had an agenda, and the truth be damned in their pursuit of it. I am so grateful to be free from that and the constant state of anxiety I felt. I let those professional agitators keep me locked into a permanent state of discontent.
Then one day I turned on the local news and there was this young man standing on a platform, positive and vibrant and talking about the injustice of job migration overseas as a result of corrupt tax and trade policies. I'll never forget that moment! I had turned the T.V. on and started to walk down the hall and was stopped in my tracks by this man’s words. I had lived and worked in manufacturing for 30 years at the time, and had experienced and seen the effects of outsourcing first hand for 25 of those years. I spun on my heels and ran to the living room and shouted to my wife, FINALLY! A politician who is defining the problem and showing the will to put forth and work on the solution!
My life changed that day when I saw Barack Obama for the first time. It has never been the same since as I have learned to listen to people and watch what they actually do after they have staked out their positions. I don't agree with every position Barack Obama takes but one thing occurred to me on this matter. If we are honest, there is no politician we agree with on 100% of the issues. In fact we may disagree on some pretty significant things, even core issues, but we are compelled to identify what a political leader represents in terms of what is best for America overall and move from there. I find this man to be honest and genuine and free from malice. He shows a real willingness to stay away from the politics of personal destruction. Does he highlight his opposition to his political opponents point of view and ask the electorate to make a decision based on the differences? Absolutely. That is as it should be. What I have seen to this point is a man who has an amazing ability to take the high road even in the midst of strongest political disagreements. That is what I consider to be a leader and that is the man I support to lead our Nation.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
America the Fickle - How a Flip-Flopping Electorate Constrains Progress - November 3, 2010
Political turmoil, and American citizens willingness to be at each others throats, reveals the now urgent need to draw the stark contrast between our grandparent's and parent's generations, and many of the offspring of those generations. I happen to be a member of that "offspring generation" who approaches things from a different perspective.
During the Great Depression President Roosevelt led the beginning of the building of modern America. In spite of tremendous hardship the generations of the Great Depression built:
- The Golden Gate Bridge
- Hoover Dam
- Most of the Canal System in the United States
- Most of our existing, electric power delivery system
- Trolley car systems in every major city, (later torn down as revealed in the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car”)
- The continuation and expansion of the New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. subway systems
- The first major city airports from coast to coast
- and a myriad other major undertakings by our Government, much of which we benefit from, to this day
All this happened during the hardest economic times our Country has seen in a hundred years, while the Great Depression was at it's peak.
How did they do this in the most challenging of times? The answer is, strong silent resolve. Gritty determination to pull together, and do whatever they could to get through impossible times, together. They did this with Government playing a major role as facilitator, encourager and implementer. Franklin Roosevelt led with a fearless determination, highlighted by his challenge during his first inaugural address that, "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."
In stark contrast, many of the children of the Franklin Roosevelt generations live their lives in constant fear. As a result they build virtually nothing. They have no vision of the future, other than wanting to live by the original Constitution. The original Constitution, which does not allow women the right to own property, effectively blocking them from voting. The original Constitution which only counts three fifth's of blacks as people, and specifically in writing, did not allow American Indians rights of any kind, (Article I, Section II, Paragraph III).
These "original constitutionalist" are clearly able to be frightened by whatever talk show host they subject themselves to, on a daily basis, that feeds them a steady diet of untruths. "Obama's a Muslim, he’s a really bad Christian, he's not a citizen, he's a Marxist, Sharia law is taking over America, the new Black Panther's are coming to get you, (all two of them)". "Valerie Plame was just a secretary, Obama's spending 200 million dollars a day to go to India", and on and on and on. These gullible souls gulp these lies down like little birds, with their mouths open wide, eating worms from their mother’s beaks, all the while not realizing the relevance of who they are listening to. 400 million dollar Rush Limbaugh, 200 million dollar Sean Hannity and 40 million dollar Glenn Beck and many others. They never correlate the agenda's these wealthy people have, that work directly against their own best interest.
They whine about electric cars. When they call into Rush he has them programmed to greet him with, "gas guzzling ditto's Rush", without understanding or caring about the irresponsibility of such a comment. They rail on about the evils of clean power, high speed rail, infrastructure improvements and anything else that would get our Nation back on track, and help restore our National pride.
It seems to me the only time these people are proud is when they are building terrible weapons of war at the multitude of factories that make up our military industrial complex, (by far our largest social program in history). How sad that we have become so adept at killing on a mass scale in so many different ways.
To me, it is sad to see these folks in action, overwhelmed by fear, whipped into a frenzy over what they see as "threats to their freedoms". Most of the Tea Party people we see on T.V. are in their fifties, sixties and older. They claim they don't want big government, but they take advantage of our largest, Roosevelt created social programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They are completely clueless regarding all the government facilities they use as a simple matter of living their lives. Things like airports, train stations, highways, mass transit systems (however old they may be), and sewage and water treatment plants, all built by the government.
Unemployment in 1929 was 23%. Ten years later in 1939 it was still a staggering 19%..... and yet the American public saw the importance of supporting a leader who represented new ideas to turn things around. They continued to elect President Roosevelt over and over again through it all, in spite of the extended pain of the Great Depression.
They knew he stood for them, and they were willing to give him the freedom and the time to fix things in whatever ways he could. Some of what he tried failed, so he discontinued programs that did not work, but much of what he introduced through the New Deal saved America, and continues on to this day.
That generation did not forget the disastrous effects of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations. That generation’s memories were fully functional. They knew it would take time to fix the mess they were in. As a result they did not let their immediate pains result in shortsightedness, which could have deteriorated into backbiting, discontent and ill advised change of direction.
Spring forward eighty years, America finds itself in another economic catastrophe as a result of policies from a previous administration. So we elect a new President, by a large majority in 2008, who has new ideas and who promises change.
He gets two major pieces of historic legislation passed in record time in spite of the obstructionist republicans, Health Care and Financial Reform. The stock market nearly doubles in under two years and many people see their 401k’s partially recover from the abyss of the 2008 crash as a result. There are 15 strait months of economic growth, but many Americans live in constant fear. Why? As a result of the crashing economy he was left with in 2009, including the 750,000 jobs a month that were being lost, unemployment was quickly rising towards double digits. He has since been able to arrest that free fall, and actually turn the job loss numbers into gains over the last nine months, but he has only moved unemployment down slightly since it's peak in January 2009.
Due to big business refusal to stop off shoring jobs in the middle of the Great Recession, and people who have been off the roles of job seekers re-entering the workforce as job growth starts, it has been challenging to move the actual percentages significantly.
In spite of these gains, many of those in the electorate live their lives watching Fox "News", whining about whatever they are told to whine about, and fearing whatever they are told to fear.
Somehow, we have gone from a bold fearless people, to a bunch of chicken little's. Many of us are now showing a shocking willingness to follow right wing pundits off the cliff of economic ruin. They are doing this by actually believing, that the crisis created by the right’s disastrous low tax and war without pay policies, is now to be fixed only by far right wing shock and awe austerity implementation. The insanity of this reasoning can only be explained by the total effectiveness of mass fear mongering.
As much as it pains me to draw this conclusion, America may need another Great Depression. We may need times to get so bad, due to Hooveristic austerity and Rand Paul Libertarianism, that we hit another all time, self imposed, economic disaster. We may need a crisis that makes us so desperately poor at the hands of the new, ultra rich, ultra powerful Robber Barons, that we find ourselves so busy working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week just to feed ourselves, that we finally learn, once and for all, the hard lessons we have not been willing to learn from a history that begs to teach us.
I am 55. Believe it or not, I have been known as eternally optimistic. When I travel, I see the progress other countries have made. High speed rail, that we built in Japan. More HSR in China, Germany, Spain, Italy and Taiwan to name just a few. Clean energy growing exponentially in China. Solar continuing to expand in Germany, Spain and Italy.
Today, two days after a disastrous, fear driven, mid-term 2010 election result, my eternal optimism has taken a blow. The Tea-Party folks showed up and carried the day. Many who supported Obama less than two short years ago could not find it within themselves to continue their support of a man they suppossedly were crazy about in late 2008. Somehow people's desire for instant gratification took over and they decided that when all wasn't made right in 20 months than it wasn't worth their time to heed the storm we all saw coming on the news every night. Now the storm is here, the Republicans are back in power ready to repeat what they did to us for nearly a decade. As a result, I am down, but only for a short while. I will bounce back by this afternoon.
My wife and I will be taking delivery of our Nissan LEAF all electric car in early 2011. We are truly thrilled about the prospect of being that much closer to freedom from oil.
We will continue to promote clean transportation and clean energy. We will do this in spite of the dirty, corrupt oil and energy giants that continually, and now in almost complete secrecy thanks to Citizens United, plot against us to destroy our health and our planet so they can make unfathomable amounts of money.
We refuse to have our hope crushed. We stand with our President, a good, honest and highly capable man. He is not perfect by any means, as we are not, but his intentions are to lead us out of a deep crisis, created by his opponents.
Whether we have economic prosperity, or economic ruin, it will not change us. We will not whine, we will not cry. We will lift up our fellow citizens with the message that hope is the light that will always eliminate darkness.
As our grandparents and parents learned, overcoming darkness during the Great Depression, and then during World War II, takes incredible sacrifice and determination. It takes consistent resolve, unity, strength of mind, body, soul and spirit.
Their sacrifices were unimaginable to most of us today. Their capacity to overcome hardship seems forgotten. They were not perfect, but in spite of their failings, we aspire to their greatness, to be victors in the tradition of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. We aspire to assist others in a vision of the future like Dr. King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s, to sharpen and hone the content of our individual and National character.
May our hope soar to heights far above our fears, so we too can leave a better world to our children and grandchildren.
Ken Muir
During the Great Depression President Roosevelt led the beginning of the building of modern America. In spite of tremendous hardship the generations of the Great Depression built:
- The Golden Gate Bridge
- Hoover Dam
- Most of the Canal System in the United States
- Most of our existing, electric power delivery system
- Trolley car systems in every major city, (later torn down as revealed in the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car”)
- The continuation and expansion of the New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. subway systems
- The first major city airports from coast to coast
- and a myriad other major undertakings by our Government, much of which we benefit from, to this day
All this happened during the hardest economic times our Country has seen in a hundred years, while the Great Depression was at it's peak.
How did they do this in the most challenging of times? The answer is, strong silent resolve. Gritty determination to pull together, and do whatever they could to get through impossible times, together. They did this with Government playing a major role as facilitator, encourager and implementer. Franklin Roosevelt led with a fearless determination, highlighted by his challenge during his first inaugural address that, "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."
In stark contrast, many of the children of the Franklin Roosevelt generations live their lives in constant fear. As a result they build virtually nothing. They have no vision of the future, other than wanting to live by the original Constitution. The original Constitution, which does not allow women the right to own property, effectively blocking them from voting. The original Constitution which only counts three fifth's of blacks as people, and specifically in writing, did not allow American Indians rights of any kind, (Article I, Section II, Paragraph III).
These "original constitutionalist" are clearly able to be frightened by whatever talk show host they subject themselves to, on a daily basis, that feeds them a steady diet of untruths. "Obama's a Muslim, he’s a really bad Christian, he's not a citizen, he's a Marxist, Sharia law is taking over America, the new Black Panther's are coming to get you, (all two of them)". "Valerie Plame was just a secretary, Obama's spending 200 million dollars a day to go to India", and on and on and on. These gullible souls gulp these lies down like little birds, with their mouths open wide, eating worms from their mother’s beaks, all the while not realizing the relevance of who they are listening to. 400 million dollar Rush Limbaugh, 200 million dollar Sean Hannity and 40 million dollar Glenn Beck and many others. They never correlate the agenda's these wealthy people have, that work directly against their own best interest.
They whine about electric cars. When they call into Rush he has them programmed to greet him with, "gas guzzling ditto's Rush", without understanding or caring about the irresponsibility of such a comment. They rail on about the evils of clean power, high speed rail, infrastructure improvements and anything else that would get our Nation back on track, and help restore our National pride.
It seems to me the only time these people are proud is when they are building terrible weapons of war at the multitude of factories that make up our military industrial complex, (by far our largest social program in history). How sad that we have become so adept at killing on a mass scale in so many different ways.
To me, it is sad to see these folks in action, overwhelmed by fear, whipped into a frenzy over what they see as "threats to their freedoms". Most of the Tea Party people we see on T.V. are in their fifties, sixties and older. They claim they don't want big government, but they take advantage of our largest, Roosevelt created social programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They are completely clueless regarding all the government facilities they use as a simple matter of living their lives. Things like airports, train stations, highways, mass transit systems (however old they may be), and sewage and water treatment plants, all built by the government.
Unemployment in 1929 was 23%. Ten years later in 1939 it was still a staggering 19%..... and yet the American public saw the importance of supporting a leader who represented new ideas to turn things around. They continued to elect President Roosevelt over and over again through it all, in spite of the extended pain of the Great Depression.
They knew he stood for them, and they were willing to give him the freedom and the time to fix things in whatever ways he could. Some of what he tried failed, so he discontinued programs that did not work, but much of what he introduced through the New Deal saved America, and continues on to this day.
That generation did not forget the disastrous effects of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations. That generation’s memories were fully functional. They knew it would take time to fix the mess they were in. As a result they did not let their immediate pains result in shortsightedness, which could have deteriorated into backbiting, discontent and ill advised change of direction.
Spring forward eighty years, America finds itself in another economic catastrophe as a result of policies from a previous administration. So we elect a new President, by a large majority in 2008, who has new ideas and who promises change.
He gets two major pieces of historic legislation passed in record time in spite of the obstructionist republicans, Health Care and Financial Reform. The stock market nearly doubles in under two years and many people see their 401k’s partially recover from the abyss of the 2008 crash as a result. There are 15 strait months of economic growth, but many Americans live in constant fear. Why? As a result of the crashing economy he was left with in 2009, including the 750,000 jobs a month that were being lost, unemployment was quickly rising towards double digits. He has since been able to arrest that free fall, and actually turn the job loss numbers into gains over the last nine months, but he has only moved unemployment down slightly since it's peak in January 2009.
Due to big business refusal to stop off shoring jobs in the middle of the Great Recession, and people who have been off the roles of job seekers re-entering the workforce as job growth starts, it has been challenging to move the actual percentages significantly.
In spite of these gains, many of those in the electorate live their lives watching Fox "News", whining about whatever they are told to whine about, and fearing whatever they are told to fear.
Somehow, we have gone from a bold fearless people, to a bunch of chicken little's. Many of us are now showing a shocking willingness to follow right wing pundits off the cliff of economic ruin. They are doing this by actually believing, that the crisis created by the right’s disastrous low tax and war without pay policies, is now to be fixed only by far right wing shock and awe austerity implementation. The insanity of this reasoning can only be explained by the total effectiveness of mass fear mongering.
As much as it pains me to draw this conclusion, America may need another Great Depression. We may need times to get so bad, due to Hooveristic austerity and Rand Paul Libertarianism, that we hit another all time, self imposed, economic disaster. We may need a crisis that makes us so desperately poor at the hands of the new, ultra rich, ultra powerful Robber Barons, that we find ourselves so busy working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week just to feed ourselves, that we finally learn, once and for all, the hard lessons we have not been willing to learn from a history that begs to teach us.
I am 55. Believe it or not, I have been known as eternally optimistic. When I travel, I see the progress other countries have made. High speed rail, that we built in Japan. More HSR in China, Germany, Spain, Italy and Taiwan to name just a few. Clean energy growing exponentially in China. Solar continuing to expand in Germany, Spain and Italy.
Today, two days after a disastrous, fear driven, mid-term 2010 election result, my eternal optimism has taken a blow. The Tea-Party folks showed up and carried the day. Many who supported Obama less than two short years ago could not find it within themselves to continue their support of a man they suppossedly were crazy about in late 2008. Somehow people's desire for instant gratification took over and they decided that when all wasn't made right in 20 months than it wasn't worth their time to heed the storm we all saw coming on the news every night. Now the storm is here, the Republicans are back in power ready to repeat what they did to us for nearly a decade. As a result, I am down, but only for a short while. I will bounce back by this afternoon.
My wife and I will be taking delivery of our Nissan LEAF all electric car in early 2011. We are truly thrilled about the prospect of being that much closer to freedom from oil.
We will continue to promote clean transportation and clean energy. We will do this in spite of the dirty, corrupt oil and energy giants that continually, and now in almost complete secrecy thanks to Citizens United, plot against us to destroy our health and our planet so they can make unfathomable amounts of money.
We refuse to have our hope crushed. We stand with our President, a good, honest and highly capable man. He is not perfect by any means, as we are not, but his intentions are to lead us out of a deep crisis, created by his opponents.
Whether we have economic prosperity, or economic ruin, it will not change us. We will not whine, we will not cry. We will lift up our fellow citizens with the message that hope is the light that will always eliminate darkness.
As our grandparents and parents learned, overcoming darkness during the Great Depression, and then during World War II, takes incredible sacrifice and determination. It takes consistent resolve, unity, strength of mind, body, soul and spirit.
Their sacrifices were unimaginable to most of us today. Their capacity to overcome hardship seems forgotten. They were not perfect, but in spite of their failings, we aspire to their greatness, to be victors in the tradition of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. We aspire to assist others in a vision of the future like Dr. King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s, to sharpen and hone the content of our individual and National character.
May our hope soar to heights far above our fears, so we too can leave a better world to our children and grandchildren.
Ken Muir
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Gulf Oil Disaster Blame Game - Time to Look in the Mirror
The APEX News Network on-line posted a short article titled, “Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010 – Sparks Debates on Energy Production”.
http://apexnewsnetwork.com/2824/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-2010-sparks-debates-on-energy-production/
At the beginning of the article was a comment regarding politicians "driving gas guzzling SUV’s or traveling in private jets" while promoting clean energy. This seems to me to be the first of two key points in this article. It not only highlights politicians hypocrisy but as you will read later, it points to ours as well.
The second key point states that "As American politicians bicker about the proper policies, American citizens will continue to hope and pray for a solution that solves our country’s energy problems and protects our environment as well."
These two comments bring us to the apex of the problems we face. Hypocrisy versus hopes and prayers are in direct opposition to each other and doom all of us to repeating a never ending cycle of drilling, refining, burning and polluting indefinitely.
Hopes are good and it is healthy for us to all have a hopeful vision of the future. As a person of faith I believe prayer is never a bad thing either, but hope and prayer on their own without aggressive action relegate us to the dusty closet of sameness. For those familiar with the Christian faith the prime example is the lives of the disciples. They had more hope than most and I am sure they prayed a lot but they gave their entire lives in devotion to the actions necessary to spread the Gospel at the behest of the One they loved.
When we step back and objectively observe what is going on in modern times, the responsibility for the tragic events we are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico does not ultimately rest with a broken political system. Most of us know that system is corrupt, and in the end will never turn against the big money interest that keep its’ wholly owned politicians in power.
Waiting for a broken political system to fix things like oil spill disasters is like a solar manufacturing company counting on government subsidies to make solar technology profitable. That is madness in the real world of business and competition. Government policies constantly change between the blowing winds of populism and lobbyist manipulation. The solar industry found this to be painfully true when Germany and Spain reversed their generous solar subsidy programs at the beginning of the great recession. The industry has been trying to recover with varied results ever since. Solar does make sense as it's clean and limitless. Big coal and oil receive massive on-going, seemingly permanent subsidies in spite of the billions and billions of dollars in profits they make. For now solar does need subsidies but long term it must and should stand on its own.
When you really drill down on who is ultimately responsible for oil as the dominating, focal commodity in our world we must get brutally honest.
The responsibility to end our indefinite dependence on oil resides wholly with us, the consuming public. What is needed is not only a sea change in our thinking but a complete reversal of actions we have taken and continue to take, day after day for nearly a hundred years now.
Of course these mind sets and behavioral changes will never be easy as we are fighting trillion dollar multi-national corporations, but…. these corporations desperately need two things, money and millions, even billions of consumers to provide that steady flow of cash that keeps their record profits and polluting practices in constant motion.
That’s where we come in. We can change our minds and as a result there are actions we can take that when multiplied millions of times over can have a real positive impact on reducing our dependence on oil.
We have a bumper sticker our 15 year old Toyota Avalon that says, “My Next Car, No Plug, No Deal”. That bumper sticker has been there for years. Our Avalon has over 200,000 miles on it. It passes smog every time and still gets 30 miles per gallon because we faithfully and meticulously maintain it. Our ultimate goal is to pressure the auto companies to move away from their 100 year old internal combustion engine technology.
We are dead serious about not buying another car unless it is significantly cleaner than our existing one. The closer to zero emissions it is and the less oil it uses, the better.
Late last year we purchased a hybrid that is rated a Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, (SULEV). Yes they really do have that designation. It exists to encourage people to think about what we drive and how we pollute. We plan to convert this car to a plug-in hybrid as soon as we can afford it, bringing it even closer to no gas and no emissions.
We are taking personal responsibility to eliminate old dirty polluting technologies from our lives overall. In March we installed solar panels on our home, (yes we did take advantage of government incentives while they are still available) and in December we are taking delivery of our Nissan LEAF all electric vehicle that we will someday charge with power directly from the sun.
It occurred to me after 9/11 just how personally responsible I was as a direct major contributor to the OPEC nations. I’m talking quite literally here. I sat down and started to add up just how much of my hard earned money goes into the pockets of people and nations who hate America. I was stunned to discover that if I lived an average lifespan, at least100,000.00 of my money was going to the Hugo Chavez’s’ and King Saud’s of the world.
Using every method I could think of I determined that’s a pretty accurate number and maybe even quite a bit lower than the actual amount.
Here’s the real stunner, multiply that by hundreds of millions of my fellow Americans and in our lifetimes the amount of wealth we directly transfer out of our Nation with our use of oil is beyond 23 trillion dollars.
Now I ask you, what businessman of any persuasion, honest or otherwise would not aggressively pursue that market?
So my next question is somewhat rhetorical. Whose fault is it really when the extraction of oil pollutes our planet?
Walk into your bathroom like I have and take a good long hard look into the mirror or better yet, look at yourself in your side view mirror the next time you are filling your car up with gas. Then turn around and walk or drive away with a commitment to do something about it. If we don’t, all of our descendants are going to have to.
Those who need big trucks can plan to replace them with hybrids, or natural gas burners. It doesn’t have to happen instantaneously but your mind can change and start to plan for a better future now. There is nothing wrong with using a more efficient or as some call it a “bridge fuel” vehicle until a more advanced technology comes along.
Most people don’t realize that diesel engine locomotives are actually giant hybrids that are not propelled by their diesel engines but instead by huge electric axle motors. The diesel engines are only there as weighs to keep the trains wheels from spinning when pulling incredible loads and as electricity generators. Train designers discovered a long time ago that you could not build a diesel engine big enough to fit in a locomotive that could pull a heavy train. They did find out electric motors have maximum torque at 1 rpm and up. If you don’t believe me, look it up. You will be as amazed as I was. This technology has been out there for 60 years. Do you really doubt that with American inventiveness we cannot do similar things for long haul truckers and people who need and prefer large format vehicles?
There are tons of exciting technologies out there today, like the 30 ton container hauler that the port of Los Angeles has been using for years. It’s all electric! Check it out.
http://www.portoflosangeles.org/newsroom/2008_releases/news_051608_et.asp
There is Smith Electrics producing electric trucks of all sizes. FedEx and UPS are already embracing these technologies. Not only do they reduce their pollution output, it just makes economic sense to try to lower their fuel cost as much as possible.
http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com/
I strongly encourage you not to be negative about these technologies. I have heard all the arguments. They don’t have enough range, they look like golf carts, they take forever to charge and on and on. Ranges are improving and electric cars and trucks are starting to hit the market that look every bit as good, if not better than their ICE counterparts. Don’t be fooled by the myth EV’s are underpowered and slow. Look at Tesla with their roadster hitting 60 miles per hour off the line in under 4 seconds? People who have driven the Nissan LEAF are always commenting on the quickness and power of the car. Rapid charging as quick as 10 minutes is becoming a reality. Battery swapping technologies are now out of the bag as evidenced by Project Better Places’ building of Israel’s’ nation wide battery swap infrastructure for the new Renault / Nissan cars coming out in 2011 and beyond. Israel gets it. Being dependant on the Middle East for oil simply does not make sense.
In spite of all the new technologies I still hear the detractors. Why? What happened to Americans saying we are going to swim against the tide and do what’s in our best interest? Why can’t we be inventors and innovators and builders again? You know the answer to that question and it is, absolutely we can!
Remember, in our time off after work in the evenings, we have been watching Auto Company and oil conglomerates marketing campaigns every few minutes for our entire lifetimes! Do you honestly think that has not biased you in any way? Please be honest with yourself. When it hits you like it did me, the freedom you experience from coming to know there is a better way is quite transformative.
One plus hundreds of millions can have an incredible impact. Let’s get serious and get this done. I don’t want our kids and grandkids to have to deal with a polluted Gulf or a polluted earth. I am going to follow my Fathers instructions to me when I was a kid. He used to say, “Kenny, when you use something, clean up after yourself and leave it better then you found it.” Good advise Dad, I’m going to do just that.
http://apexnewsnetwork.com/2824/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-2010-sparks-debates-on-energy-production/
At the beginning of the article was a comment regarding politicians "driving gas guzzling SUV’s or traveling in private jets" while promoting clean energy. This seems to me to be the first of two key points in this article. It not only highlights politicians hypocrisy but as you will read later, it points to ours as well.
The second key point states that "As American politicians bicker about the proper policies, American citizens will continue to hope and pray for a solution that solves our country’s energy problems and protects our environment as well."
These two comments bring us to the apex of the problems we face. Hypocrisy versus hopes and prayers are in direct opposition to each other and doom all of us to repeating a never ending cycle of drilling, refining, burning and polluting indefinitely.
Hopes are good and it is healthy for us to all have a hopeful vision of the future. As a person of faith I believe prayer is never a bad thing either, but hope and prayer on their own without aggressive action relegate us to the dusty closet of sameness. For those familiar with the Christian faith the prime example is the lives of the disciples. They had more hope than most and I am sure they prayed a lot but they gave their entire lives in devotion to the actions necessary to spread the Gospel at the behest of the One they loved.
When we step back and objectively observe what is going on in modern times, the responsibility for the tragic events we are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico does not ultimately rest with a broken political system. Most of us know that system is corrupt, and in the end will never turn against the big money interest that keep its’ wholly owned politicians in power.
Waiting for a broken political system to fix things like oil spill disasters is like a solar manufacturing company counting on government subsidies to make solar technology profitable. That is madness in the real world of business and competition. Government policies constantly change between the blowing winds of populism and lobbyist manipulation. The solar industry found this to be painfully true when Germany and Spain reversed their generous solar subsidy programs at the beginning of the great recession. The industry has been trying to recover with varied results ever since. Solar does make sense as it's clean and limitless. Big coal and oil receive massive on-going, seemingly permanent subsidies in spite of the billions and billions of dollars in profits they make. For now solar does need subsidies but long term it must and should stand on its own.
When you really drill down on who is ultimately responsible for oil as the dominating, focal commodity in our world we must get brutally honest.
The responsibility to end our indefinite dependence on oil resides wholly with us, the consuming public. What is needed is not only a sea change in our thinking but a complete reversal of actions we have taken and continue to take, day after day for nearly a hundred years now.
Of course these mind sets and behavioral changes will never be easy as we are fighting trillion dollar multi-national corporations, but…. these corporations desperately need two things, money and millions, even billions of consumers to provide that steady flow of cash that keeps their record profits and polluting practices in constant motion.
That’s where we come in. We can change our minds and as a result there are actions we can take that when multiplied millions of times over can have a real positive impact on reducing our dependence on oil.
We have a bumper sticker our 15 year old Toyota Avalon that says, “My Next Car, No Plug, No Deal”. That bumper sticker has been there for years. Our Avalon has over 200,000 miles on it. It passes smog every time and still gets 30 miles per gallon because we faithfully and meticulously maintain it. Our ultimate goal is to pressure the auto companies to move away from their 100 year old internal combustion engine technology.
We are dead serious about not buying another car unless it is significantly cleaner than our existing one. The closer to zero emissions it is and the less oil it uses, the better.
Late last year we purchased a hybrid that is rated a Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, (SULEV). Yes they really do have that designation. It exists to encourage people to think about what we drive and how we pollute. We plan to convert this car to a plug-in hybrid as soon as we can afford it, bringing it even closer to no gas and no emissions.
We are taking personal responsibility to eliminate old dirty polluting technologies from our lives overall. In March we installed solar panels on our home, (yes we did take advantage of government incentives while they are still available) and in December we are taking delivery of our Nissan LEAF all electric vehicle that we will someday charge with power directly from the sun.
It occurred to me after 9/11 just how personally responsible I was as a direct major contributor to the OPEC nations. I’m talking quite literally here. I sat down and started to add up just how much of my hard earned money goes into the pockets of people and nations who hate America. I was stunned to discover that if I lived an average lifespan, at least100,000.00 of my money was going to the Hugo Chavez’s’ and King Saud’s of the world.
Using every method I could think of I determined that’s a pretty accurate number and maybe even quite a bit lower than the actual amount.
Here’s the real stunner, multiply that by hundreds of millions of my fellow Americans and in our lifetimes the amount of wealth we directly transfer out of our Nation with our use of oil is beyond 23 trillion dollars.
Now I ask you, what businessman of any persuasion, honest or otherwise would not aggressively pursue that market?
So my next question is somewhat rhetorical. Whose fault is it really when the extraction of oil pollutes our planet?
Walk into your bathroom like I have and take a good long hard look into the mirror or better yet, look at yourself in your side view mirror the next time you are filling your car up with gas. Then turn around and walk or drive away with a commitment to do something about it. If we don’t, all of our descendants are going to have to.
Those who need big trucks can plan to replace them with hybrids, or natural gas burners. It doesn’t have to happen instantaneously but your mind can change and start to plan for a better future now. There is nothing wrong with using a more efficient or as some call it a “bridge fuel” vehicle until a more advanced technology comes along.
Most people don’t realize that diesel engine locomotives are actually giant hybrids that are not propelled by their diesel engines but instead by huge electric axle motors. The diesel engines are only there as weighs to keep the trains wheels from spinning when pulling incredible loads and as electricity generators. Train designers discovered a long time ago that you could not build a diesel engine big enough to fit in a locomotive that could pull a heavy train. They did find out electric motors have maximum torque at 1 rpm and up. If you don’t believe me, look it up. You will be as amazed as I was. This technology has been out there for 60 years. Do you really doubt that with American inventiveness we cannot do similar things for long haul truckers and people who need and prefer large format vehicles?
There are tons of exciting technologies out there today, like the 30 ton container hauler that the port of Los Angeles has been using for years. It’s all electric! Check it out.
http://www.portoflosangeles.org/newsroom/2008_releases/news_051608_et.asp
There is Smith Electrics producing electric trucks of all sizes. FedEx and UPS are already embracing these technologies. Not only do they reduce their pollution output, it just makes economic sense to try to lower their fuel cost as much as possible.
http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com/
I strongly encourage you not to be negative about these technologies. I have heard all the arguments. They don’t have enough range, they look like golf carts, they take forever to charge and on and on. Ranges are improving and electric cars and trucks are starting to hit the market that look every bit as good, if not better than their ICE counterparts. Don’t be fooled by the myth EV’s are underpowered and slow. Look at Tesla with their roadster hitting 60 miles per hour off the line in under 4 seconds? People who have driven the Nissan LEAF are always commenting on the quickness and power of the car. Rapid charging as quick as 10 minutes is becoming a reality. Battery swapping technologies are now out of the bag as evidenced by Project Better Places’ building of Israel’s’ nation wide battery swap infrastructure for the new Renault / Nissan cars coming out in 2011 and beyond. Israel gets it. Being dependant on the Middle East for oil simply does not make sense.
In spite of all the new technologies I still hear the detractors. Why? What happened to Americans saying we are going to swim against the tide and do what’s in our best interest? Why can’t we be inventors and innovators and builders again? You know the answer to that question and it is, absolutely we can!
Remember, in our time off after work in the evenings, we have been watching Auto Company and oil conglomerates marketing campaigns every few minutes for our entire lifetimes! Do you honestly think that has not biased you in any way? Please be honest with yourself. When it hits you like it did me, the freedom you experience from coming to know there is a better way is quite transformative.
One plus hundreds of millions can have an incredible impact. Let’s get serious and get this done. I don’t want our kids and grandkids to have to deal with a polluted Gulf or a polluted earth. I am going to follow my Fathers instructions to me when I was a kid. He used to say, “Kenny, when you use something, clean up after yourself and leave it better then you found it.” Good advise Dad, I’m going to do just that.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
High Speed Rail - Moving Quietly into the Future
Rod Diridon is a legend and visionary who has inspired me to work to get High Speed Rail in California done. Rod came to my place of employment recently to show his remarkable presentation on the California High Speed Rail system. This is the second time I have seen Rod give this presentation. What strikes me the most is just how far behind America is in relation to the clean transportation sector. Whether it is electrifying our current rail system, producing electric vehicles or implementing High Speed Rail, especially in one of our most populist states, we are followers instead of leaders.
Some Americans seem to love to run around bragging to everyone how we live in the “greatest Country in the world” but it’s usually these same braggadocios who insist on holding us back into the dark ages of coal and oil as our main sources of power and transportation.
I am in Taiwan now on business working with two suppliers whose facilities are 100 - 200 meters from Taiwan's HSR. Do you know what you hear when they go by at 300 km/h /186 mph? Nothing if you are inside the building and whoosh, if you’re standing out front. That's it! Whoosh! No blaring diesel horns, no ding, ding, ding of road crossing barriers, no violent shaking of the earth like what happens when Caltrains goes by, just a whoosh.
All of California's High Speed Rail system will be what's called "grade separated". That means the trains will not cause cross traffic to stop ever again! The trains will either go over or under all intersections. Brilliant! The only place they will stop is in beautiful new stations.
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
In addition, the existing rail corridor on the peninsula will accommodate both HSR and a "converted to all electric" Caltrain. Imagine that, complete elimination of the existing pollution bellowing behemoths Caltrain currently operates, to the nearly silent version, and High Speed Rail running along side of it in the same corridor.
There is one big problem though. The same people who stopped BART from coming down the peninsula 40 years ago are once again fighting to stop HSR. The difference now is that they aren’t only depriving the millions of people of San Francisco and the South Bay from using clean rapid transit, they are now using their weapons of backwardness and ignorance to keep the entire State of California from building a clean energy, clean transportation future. They are the only ones in the entire State taking legal action to stop High Speed Rail operating between two of Northern California's biggest cities, San Francisco and San Jose.
These cities are Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto. My understanding is the majority of the folks living in these cities are for HSR and the Caltrain conversion, but there are a few very wealthy, very powerful, visionless, backward thinking people pulling out all the stops to ruin moving into the future for everyone in California.
Outside of complete and total disregard for their fellow Bay Area residents they steadfastly insist on keeping a noisy, dirty, diesel, inefficient, road blocking system in place. Why? All I can think of is, sheer ignorance and/or selfishness beyond imagination.
The new system will be cleaner, quieter, faster and more efficient. It will facilitate business growth in the Bay Area at levels not seen in 20 years. It will drastically reduce another one of the dirtiest forms of transportation, short hop air travel. It will reduce traffic on 101 and 280 running up and down the peninsula as well as far less traffic on Interstates 5 and 99.
When going to Southern California what appeals to you more, fighting the airports or the roadways or smoothly riding along High Speed Rail while visiting with your friends or family, reading a book or newspaper and getting to your destination in far less time than it takes to drive and even less time than it takes to fly when taking into consideration getting in and out of two airports.
So here is the challenge. Flood the cities of Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto with letters and emails. Show up at their City Council meetings and make them answer these questions. Demand that they give us real answers for their stubbornness so the light of day can be fully shinned on their darker more selfish motives.
Being the eternal optimist, I know in my heart High Speed Rail in California will not be stopped. Not this time. This is too important to turn back the clock and watch the rest of the world continue to speed ahead without us. It’s time we lead again. It’s time we show that we are still capable of innovating and building and making things better for future generations.
Some Americans seem to love to run around bragging to everyone how we live in the “greatest Country in the world” but it’s usually these same braggadocios who insist on holding us back into the dark ages of coal and oil as our main sources of power and transportation.
I am in Taiwan now on business working with two suppliers whose facilities are 100 - 200 meters from Taiwan's HSR. Do you know what you hear when they go by at 300 km/h /186 mph? Nothing if you are inside the building and whoosh, if you’re standing out front. That's it! Whoosh! No blaring diesel horns, no ding, ding, ding of road crossing barriers, no violent shaking of the earth like what happens when Caltrains goes by, just a whoosh.
All of California's High Speed Rail system will be what's called "grade separated". That means the trains will not cause cross traffic to stop ever again! The trains will either go over or under all intersections. Brilliant! The only place they will stop is in beautiful new stations.
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
In addition, the existing rail corridor on the peninsula will accommodate both HSR and a "converted to all electric" Caltrain. Imagine that, complete elimination of the existing pollution bellowing behemoths Caltrain currently operates, to the nearly silent version, and High Speed Rail running along side of it in the same corridor.
There is one big problem though. The same people who stopped BART from coming down the peninsula 40 years ago are once again fighting to stop HSR. The difference now is that they aren’t only depriving the millions of people of San Francisco and the South Bay from using clean rapid transit, they are now using their weapons of backwardness and ignorance to keep the entire State of California from building a clean energy, clean transportation future. They are the only ones in the entire State taking legal action to stop High Speed Rail operating between two of Northern California's biggest cities, San Francisco and San Jose.
These cities are Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto. My understanding is the majority of the folks living in these cities are for HSR and the Caltrain conversion, but there are a few very wealthy, very powerful, visionless, backward thinking people pulling out all the stops to ruin moving into the future for everyone in California.
Outside of complete and total disregard for their fellow Bay Area residents they steadfastly insist on keeping a noisy, dirty, diesel, inefficient, road blocking system in place. Why? All I can think of is, sheer ignorance and/or selfishness beyond imagination.
The new system will be cleaner, quieter, faster and more efficient. It will facilitate business growth in the Bay Area at levels not seen in 20 years. It will drastically reduce another one of the dirtiest forms of transportation, short hop air travel. It will reduce traffic on 101 and 280 running up and down the peninsula as well as far less traffic on Interstates 5 and 99.
When going to Southern California what appeals to you more, fighting the airports or the roadways or smoothly riding along High Speed Rail while visiting with your friends or family, reading a book or newspaper and getting to your destination in far less time than it takes to drive and even less time than it takes to fly when taking into consideration getting in and out of two airports.
So here is the challenge. Flood the cities of Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto with letters and emails. Show up at their City Council meetings and make them answer these questions. Demand that they give us real answers for their stubbornness so the light of day can be fully shinned on their darker more selfish motives.
Being the eternal optimist, I know in my heart High Speed Rail in California will not be stopped. Not this time. This is too important to turn back the clock and watch the rest of the world continue to speed ahead without us. It’s time we lead again. It’s time we show that we are still capable of innovating and building and making things better for future generations.
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